


The Cousin of Death

by Sinope



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Slavery, F/M, M/M, No Longer Updated
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2013-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:05:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sinope/pseuds/Sinope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You have never not been a slave.</i>
</p><p>In which Tony Stark is a slave owner who likes to be held down, Steve will always fight for freedom, Phil lost his ideals but regains them, and Bruce sets interesting legal precedents.</p><p>A slavery AU and a WIP, so be warned on both fronts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Steve

**Author's Note:**

> tl;dr: I am aware of the many problematic issues inherent in a slave!AU. I discuss my approach to these issues at more length in the endnotes, so skip there before you read if you're concerned.
> 
> This is a WIP which I plan to update about once a week. Note that many of the pairings listed will not be relevant until much later. Also note that I will switch writing voices each chapter, so if second person drives you nuts, you'll only have to endure one chapter of it. ;-)

You have never not been a slave.

 

...

 

In 1880, your father was born a free man named Joseph Collins, the son of two Irish nationalists. His parents aided a bombing campaign for Ireland's independence from the British. The Fenian dynamite campaign failed, and the government sold them to two different masters. Your father was five years old at the time, so he stayed with his mother; he never saw his father again.

In 1906, your father crossed the Atlantic with Charles and Emily Rogers; he was a wedding gift from Emily's parents. The voyage was lengthy and cramped, and the Rogers family was not overly wealthy, but they shared their blankets with your father to soften the wood floor where he slept. Your mother told you this story often, whenever she tried to remind you of how lucky you all were; she painted you a vivid picture of the cramped cabin, the swaying deck, and your father singing ballads to calm Mistress Rogers' nerves when the waves barreled hard against the walls. A single happy family.

In 1917, Charles sent your father to fight the war in Europe in his stead, because the third Rogers child had just been born, and Emily wanted her husband nearby. His calm conviction won him a place in the 107th, the first integrated unit in the U.S. Army. Eight months later, he came home on leave, and all he would say to your mother was that his heart was sick of war. Five months after that, he died in the trenches. The news sent your mother into premature labor, and you were born, underweight, amidst her sorrow.

In 1924, the Rogers' youngest came down with tuberculosis. Your mother nursed him through the worst of it, holding him tight through the horrible coughing fits and cooking him meat-rich broths. Matthew Rogers recovered to full health, though he would fight off a hollow cough every winter. But your mother caught the tuberculosis, and the Rogers were too short-handed to spare you to tend her sickbed. She died. You had never outgrown your frail infancy, barely able to carry coal or peel potatoes, always needing medicine or rest, so they sold you to the Army.

The Rogers children cried when you left the household. You had already spent all your tears at your mother's grave.

 

...

 

The Army sent you to West Point, where you shined officers' shoes and peeled even more potatoes. After a few years, you met Bucky there; his old master was a bachelor captain who'd had willed all his possessions to the Army. Bucky was tall and handsome, and he'd practice the soldiers' stances in his spare time; he could disassemble and reassemble any firearm in the armory in under a minute. He whispered at night about how he was going to be a soldier as soon as they let him; he'd rise in the ranks and save up all his spending money until he could buy himself, and then he'd marry a pretty girl and move to San Francisco.

You knew that you'd never rise in the ranks. You also knew that you weren't much interested in pretty girls. But as long as you never said those things aloud, both of you could pretend that bright futures lay ahead.

"Do you ever miss your old master?" Bucky asked you one night.

You shrugged. "I miss living with other kids. Sometimes they'd have extra penny candy and give it to me. Do you?"

A pause. "Yeah. I do." There was something about his tone, something sad and longing and faintly bitter. The silence that followed gave you time to replay his words in your head and examine them, wondering if a pretty girl was what Bucky wanted either. Maybe he wanted the same unnatural things that you did.

It felt easier to imagine that Bucky was an invert than to imagine that anyone could miss being owned.

 

...

 

When war broke out, Bucky got placed in the 107th. It wasn't the only integrated unit any more, but it was the best-known, and rumors said that it was the only one where the slaves weren't automatically in the front line. You tried to enlist, too, because Bucky was the only part of West Point that was home, but your supervisor laughed in your face. "They don't need cannon fodder that bad, kid. Go back to peeling potatoes. It's what you Irish do best, right?"

(Sometimes, at night, you'd flex your fist back and forth, wondering how it'd feel to punch Mr. Mason in the nose. You knew that he'd just laugh at you and have you whipped -- if you were lucky -- but just imagining it felt satisfying. Sometimes, you'd fall asleep and dream of knocking him to the ground, crouching over him, and punching him over and over, until his handsome face turned into a slimy red pulp. You woke up with sticky pants, after, and hated yourself a little.)

Without Bucky around, you had more time on your own, and you'd spend it drawing with pencil stubs and scrap paper that you rescued from the trash. You drew comics about a scrawny slave who joined the Army; everyone in his unit laughed at him, but in the battlefield he led the toughest charges and shot the trickiest targets. Private Stevens fought and never quit, because he was fighting for America, and America stood for freedom.

Eventually, Mr. Mason found your drawings. He tossed them on a table in the mess hall, so that all the soldiers could snicker at the weakling slave with fantasies of self-importance. Your cheeks flamed crimson at the laughter, but you refused to apologize for dreaming.

The next day, a foreign man named Dr. Erskine took you aside. He said that they needed test subjects for a top-secret project. The procedure was still dangerous -- _that's why we're using slaves_ went unsaid -- but if it worked, you'd be transformed into a weapon to stop Adolf from taking over the world. You said yes.

 

...

 

Captain America was not a slave. That fact was so obvious that none of your interviewers even asked the question. Sometimes they'd ask about your childhood or background, but you'd flash them a smile and say that you were "just a kid from Brooklyn." If they pressed you, you'd tell them very seriously that the whole point of Captain America was that you could be anybody, because America was a land where every man had the right to stand tall and defend his country.

Captain America wasn't a slave, but Steve Rogers never stopped being one. When you flew into Nazi territory to rescue Bucky, you knew that you weren't just facing court-martial; a slave was a slave, and leaving without permission was an escape attempt, and the only question was whether a judge would order branding or death. You went anyway.

 

...

 

The law was the law. Howard Stark tried to buy you when he heard you were to be punished, but Colonel Phillips just shrugged with genuine regret. "He's not mine to sell. The deal was that we'd use him until we won the war, and then he'd go back to the people who helped us make him -- some goddamn top-secret agency, I don't even know."

They branded you on the forearm, a small lowercase "r" in a circle: "runaway, not dangerous." The brand took two months to fade away on your perfect skin. The law said that it had to be burned back on, but that could only happen if its absence was reported, and no one ever quite bothered.

 

...

 

"Sir, I have a unit of men who're the best soldiers I've seen," you told Colonel Phillips. "I have no doubt of their ability to wipe Hydra off their map. But if you want us fighting at our peak, I need two things. First, I don't care if you have a freeman as a figurehead who stays on base, but I need to be able to give orders in the field without getting them individually approved. And second, these men need to know what they're fighting for. I want you to give them manumission papers when they get their discharge papers."

Phillips raised his eyebrows high, but he nodded. "I'll do what I can for them. But you know I can't promise the same for you."

"I know," you said. If it meant saving that many others, you could swallow any sacrifice.

 

...

 

Mistress Carter -- "call me Peggy, please" -- was beautiful, strong, and unafraid of any man, woman, or slave. You'd noticed the way she looked at you, of course, but you waited for her to act first, because everyone knew what happened to slave men who tried to compromise their mistresses.

"I'm with SHIELD, you know," she said to you once, when you were alone.

"Who?"

"The agency that helped the Army make you. We'll get you back as soon as we win this thing, and then -- I have an estate, back in England, out in the countryside. I could pull strings, have you live there as my bodyguard, and nobody would have to know that it was different."

"Just another slave," you agreed, a soft note of irony in your voice, and Peggy made a face.

"Steve, I've never treated you as anything but an equal." Her voice sounded honestly hurt.

"I know," you said, conciliatory. "It sounds like a good life."

You thought about Bucky's teenage fantasies: a pretty girl and a house of their own. This, you supposed, was as close as you were likely to get.

 

...

 

In 1944, you crashed into the ice. Captain America, who was never a slave, became a legend. Steve Rogers, who was never free, redeemed the world.

 

...

 

In 2012, you wake up. SHIELD gives you quarters of your own while they decide what to do with you; they're the biggest and most luxurious rooms you've ever slept in. "We take care of our own," Master Fury tells you.

They give you history books and dossiers on the people you left behind; they take photographs of you, clothed and unclothed, and document all your skills, military and otherwise. You start to guess their motives when your history reading catches up to the 1960s and their "sexual revolution." There's no longer any shame about keeping slaves for pure pleasure, the books say; Americans can explore their erotic desires freely, no matter the gender or legal status of their partners. The newspaper's bestseller list contains two memoirs written by slaves about their sexual exploits; one is a tasteful, romantic epic, while the other describes the most salacious experiences with multiple partners and strange fetishes, all in sordid detail.

Half the country seems proud of the growing liberalizing of society; the other half complains about "political correctness run amuck" and argues that society ran better when everyone put slaves in their place.

You're certain that SHIELD is watching everything you read, so you don't dare look up the state of abolitionism, and the movement only ranks a brief mention in the history books; thanks to America's widespread tolerance, they say, the country provides a safe haven even for radical groups, from animal rights activists to emancipationists -- as long as they respect the laws of the land.

You do look up SHIELD, though. There isn't much about them, but you find out what their name stands for: Selective Humans Indoctrinated, Enhanced, Located, and Delivered. They're the most elite slave dealership in the world, with a renowned R&D department and an industry-standard recapture program for escapees. (You haven't seen any overt signs of the "indoctrination" part, but perhaps they assumed that you're already sufficiently tame.)

You spend a month in limbo, learning about the modern world while you prime your body for whatever they need of it. They keep you waxed and groomed and comfortable. At last, Master Fury finds you in the gym one night, and he slaps a thick dossier on the nearest table. "You up for a challenge, Captain?" he asks.

"Always, sir," you say, because what else can you answer?

"Good man," Fury nods. "We've got high standards and a good reputation, here at SHIELD, and I'm counting on you not to let us down. So let me tell you about Tony Stark."

You miss fighting for a cause you believed in, and you miss the Commandos, and you miss Bucky like air, and you're sick of the self-congratulatory open-mindedness of this world you fought to save. But you still remember what your mother said once, exhausted from a day wrangling the Rogers children at the beach. " _Life's like those waves,_ " she said. " _You can't keep it from pummeling you, but at least you can choose to face it head-on._ "

You step forward and pick up the dossier.


	2. Phil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Looks like my once-a-week estimate was slightly optimistic this time, but I'm still planning to keep to that approximate schedule as I go. Thanks for your patience. As before, all feedback is treasured.

Phil loves his job, and not just because he's damn good at it. He likes helping people's lives run smoothly; he likes finding the perfect match for a first-time master or mistress, someone to become the extra limb they never knew they were missing. He especially likes the luxury of a vast R&D department, because every day he gets to see marvels cast in human flesh; they're revolutionizing the limits of human ability and the range of human use. Some teams pursue technological strategies, enhancing slaves with cybernetic devices to do tasks no normal human could; others use lasers to splice human DNA or bombard it with gamma radiation, instantly tailoring abilities that would have taken generations of selective breeding to produce.

Phil rarely has time to immerse himself in the latest advances, though. He never earned the advanced degrees to do the actual research, and Fury finds him most useful on retrieval ops. Phil's the best in SHIELD at putting together scattered clues to locate fugitives, then formulating airtight strategies for capture. His retrieval rate's over 90%, almost all alive and relatively uninjured. (After all, killing a runaway doesn't benefit anyone. Phil hates waste.)

But Phil's greatest strength, the reason that Fury calls him his "one good eye," is that he learns from mistakes. After each retrieval, he submits a report with suggestions about how it could have been prevented: better matching, stricter enforcement of anti-cruelty laws, redundancy in tracking implants. Phil initiated the telephone hotline that slaves can call to hear judgment-free alternatives to running away, and he led the push to include endorphin boosters for good behavior in SHIELD's line of StarkTech collars and bracelets.

"It's all about prevention," he explains to each batch of new SHIELD agents. "Our assets are extraordinarily valuable, and runaway attempts are stressful to the client, painful to the fugitive, and costly to our agency. We have the best retrieval team in the world, but our greatest successes are all the slaves who choose not to run away in the first place."

Phil loves his job, and not just because he's damn good at it. But in the end, being good at it doesn't hurt.

 

...

 

Once, Phil believed in heroes. In his comic books and TV shows, heroes chose to do right, no matter the cost, and they changed the world through their courage. So when he was six, he waved his Captain America shield in the playground and announced his plan to defend the innocent against all foes.

He joined the Army, because that was where Cap had served, and he tried every day to be the kind of man who'd make Cap proud. He tossed the first recruitment letter from SHIELD in the trash; they'd offered him a lucrative package, but heroes didn't sell out, no matter what the price.

The second recruitment letter came hand-delivered by Nick Fury. "I hear you're a fan of Captain America," Fury said.

"I am."

"It might interest you to know that he's one of ours."

Phil processed the information. A radical implication like that had to be confirmed outright. "Explain."

Fury handed Phil a photo of a skinny boy in an Army uniform. "Steve Rogers. Asthmatic, uncoordinated, and a hundred pounds dripping wet. He made a piss-poor slave, right up until they transformed him into Captain America in Project Rebirth. SHIELD's always led the industry in physical alterations and enhancements, so we provided the Army with the technology, and they promised him to us after he won the war for them."

"Which is irrelevant at this point," Phil said, still processing that Captain America, the hero who punched Hitler, had been a slave.

"Perhaps." Fury gave Phil an enigmatic half-smile. "But my point is that SHIELD isn't just about making profit for our shareholders. We influence and aid some of the most important people in the world, and sometimes we create them outright."

Once, Phil believed in heroes. But Nick Fury taught him that heroes didn't change the world because they did the right thing. Heroes changed the world because those with power enabled it. So Phil stopped trying to be a hero, and he started to be a pragmatist.

 

...

 

Phil hates being assigned to floaters. They're runaway slaves who've vanished off the radar for so long that their masters cut their losses and sold their titles for a fraction of the cost. Floaters are always a risky investment -- more often than not, they've already died or been resold on the black market -- and even when they're still out there, their trail has long gone cold. Most brokers just buy and sell floater titles in bulk, hoping for a lucky traffic cop or border patrol.

But sometimes, SHIELD gets its hands on a floater who's worth the resources and risk of an active retrieval, someone who's tough enough to stay alive and valuable enough to hunt. That's how, early in his fifth year at SHIELD, Phil learns about a floater named Clint Barton.

The first sheet of information about Clint doesn't tell Phil why SHIELD wants him so badly. He's good-looking, but in a rough-edged way that speaks of personality, not the flawless beauty that commands fortunes. No formal education, no irreplaceable knowledge. Raised in a circus, but his act was trick archery, not the kind of thing with potential to become a performance artist. Suspected of criminal ties -- it's virtually impossible to disappear long-term without them, after all -- but nothing concrete.

Phil flips the page. The next several sheets are nothing but a series of photographs of crime scenes ... no, that's not true. Some of them are scenes from property crimes: stolen valuables, mostly, with a handful of data thefts. Others are photographs of wanted criminals, practically tied up in a bow for police, and often accompanied by compromising evidence. Captions summarize the relevant information; the photos go back three years and come primarily from North America.

There's one thing all the photos have in common, though. Every one of them contains arrows embedded with impossible precision.

Phil connects the dots -- weapons skills, internal code of morality, demonstrated expertise at hunting down and capturing criminals -- and realizes what Fury wants before he has to turn to the next page. Clint isn't valuable as merchandise for SHIELD to sell; he's valuable as an asset for SHIELD to train.

 

...

 

It takes two months and more overtime than Phil likes to admit before he first speaks with Clint, a.k.a. "Hawkeye." (Phil suspects he uses the code name to give his contacts plausible deniability; the penalties for harboring runaways are severe, but the police have to establish that the defendant knew the person was a fugitive.) Phil's tracked him to the apartment in Cincinnati where he's been squatting, so he waits until Clint's gone for the evening before breaking in to search the place.

He finds Clint waiting on the couch, in the dark, to all appearances casually relaxed. "Hey, Mr. Suit," he says when Phil's flashlight falls on him. "You can turn on the lights if you want, though I'm cool with the romantic darkness."

Phil doesn't bother asking why Clint's there. Clearly, he noticed Phil's surveillance, staged the opportunity, then doubled back into the house. So either Clint's given up on running -- unlikely, given his record -- or he's confident enough in his escape abilities to risk a face-to-face meeting. Either way, he's already got the home turf advantage, so Phil turns on the room's lights.

That's when he gets his first look of Clint that isn't filtered through a photograph or a binocular lens. The man's even more handsome in person, his craggy face radiating calm intensity, but he's also got a scarred, haggard undertone from his years on the run. "It's good to meet you at last, Clint," he finally says, keeping his voice calm.

"Now, that's not fair," Clint says. "You know my name, and all I know is that you're the guy in a suit who's been stalking me."

Unexpectedly, Phil feels a slight flush burning his cheeks. "'Stalking' isn't the word I'd use. You do know that you're a fugitive, right?"

Clint's eyes narrow. "Funny. So are you gonna tell me why you're following me around, instead of just arresting me?"

"You've been a runaway for over three years, Clint, and you've compounded it with a number of property thefts. If you get arrested, the best outcome that's likely is a life sentence. I don't think either of us want that to happen." Phil pauses. "Besides, my employer holds your title. It's in our interests to bring you in, not hang you out to dry."

Clint huffs an unamused laugh, eyes turning contemplative for a brief flicker. "So Chisholm finally gave up on hunting me down, and I got sold to someone crazy enough to waste their time chasing floaters. Lucky me. You're here to capture me, then?"

Phil shrugs. "I'd rather not."

"If you're trying to pull some kind of 'suck my dick, hand me $1000, and I'll let you escape' bullshit, dude, you're going to be disappointed."

"Funny coincidence there," Phil says smoothly. "I like to have sex the same way that I'd like you to come with me: consensually."

"Great, my stalker's not so much creepy as crazy. Check. So give me your pitch on why I should 'consensually' go back to being a slave."

Phil exhales, then recites the speech he’s had weeks to rehearse. "Because it makes sense for you in the short term and the long term. You _are_ a slave, just a runaway one. We're looking to keep you, not resell you, and a stable work environment will give you the ability to save up money, buy yourself, and become legally free. We don't mistreat our slaves, and we're very impressed by the quality of your work. Given the right equipment and backup, you could be world-class. Join us willingly, and you'll have a better life now and the hope of legitimate freedom in the future. It's the best option you've got."

A fraction of the tension eases from Clint's posture, though he's clearly still not sold on the idea. "Let's say, hypothetically, that I believed you. My skills aren't exactly the kind you can put on a resume. What will you have me doing?"

"You'd be doing what I do," Phil says simply. "You'd help us bring in runaway slaves."

"Oh _hell fucking no_ ," Clint snaps, and his face closes down completely. His hand's been resting on the TV remote control beside the couch, fiddling with it idly, but with a split-second's notice, he throws the remote right at Phil's temple. Phil's unconscious before he can even admire Clint's aim.

Seven months pass, and Clint doesn't so much as ping Phil's radar.

 

...

 

Phil lives alone. He could probably afford a slave if he saved up for one; SHIELD pays well, and he's not inclined to an indulgent lifestyle. His mother, who long ago gave up on the possibility that Phil would stay home from work long enough to start a family, keeps offering to give him the down payment on a slave as a birthday gift. ( _"At least then you'll have someone to take care of you,"_ she tells him, with the pointed concern she's perfected.)

But Phil likes to think he does fine, taking care of himself, and some part of him has never felt at ease with the idea of owning someone else. In his college philosophy courses, he'd always be the one challenging his classmates by playing devil's advocate and arguing for abolitionism, even if he mostly did it because his classmates were closed-minded dickheads. At the end of the day, he'd shrugged and conceded that slavery was a necessary evil, like factory-farmed animals or economic trade with dictatorships. Looking at the details might make you squeamish, but take it away, and you'd have to make radical and unpleasant changes to your world. Easier just not to look.

Because he's only feeding himself, then, Phil can indulge in a nice apartment. He's got a great view, gleaming utilitarian appliances, and several layers of security between his street and his front door. All that security only makes it more frustrating when Phil comes home from work one day to find Clint leaning against his apartment door, sporting an unshaven face, tattered clothing, and a long, thin, still-oozing wound down one arm. When Phil turns the corner, Clint smiles, even though there's weariness sunk into his features. "How's your head?"

"No longer bruised." Phil walks up to him, but he doesn't open the door. "How's life on the run?"

Clint smirks. "Pretty shitty, but it could be worse."

Phil closes his eyes. It's been a long day, and he should probably be focusing on incapacitating Clint, but he's certain that Clint has at least a couple more defenses than he's letting on. "If you're just here to taunt me, I'd like to make my dinner now."

"What's on the menu tonight?"

" _Clint._ "

Clint sighs, stands up, and stretches, leaving Phil space to step past him to the door. "I did some research. Talked to slaves you brought in. They all said that you didn't lie to them or rough them up more than you had to."

"I try," Phil nods. He pulls out his keys to unlock the door; if Clint just wanted to break into his apartment, he would've done so before Phil got there.

"I'll come in on four conditions," Clint says. "Number one, you never sell me to anyone else. Try it, and I'll run away before their bank transfer goes through, I swear it. Number two, I work for _you_. Number three, you don't get to own me; SHIELD keeps me as a company slave. Number four, I think that slavery is the most fucked-up, terrible thing in the world right now, and I'm never going to lie to someone and tell them different."

"What if I can't agree to those conditions?"

"Then I go back to living on the run, or I die trying," Clint says flatly. "Fucking hell, I already hate myself for considering going back to all this, just on principle. But I'd rather die than be owned by another person again."

There's no bravado in Clint's voice, no bluffing, just defeat. Phil nods, even as he's mentally figuring out how to frame the situation to Fury. "I'm not going back to Midtown tonight. You like chicken alfredo?" He's not even going to ask whether Clint's hungry; he can practically count his ribs through his shirt.

"Love it," Clint says. The smile on his face is a work of art, paint layered on paint. On the surface, it's light and even flirtatious; below that, it's grateful; below that, it's relieved; and somewhere below that, scrubbed-over and scratched through, it's a rictus of desperation and despair.

"Come on in, then," Phil says, and he makes himself walk inside with Clint at his back. If he's going to work with Clint, then he has to trust him. It's not even as hard as he expected.

 

...

 

Phil's proud of himself for getting all four conditions met. Fury doesn't like the idea of slaves making ultimatums, so Phil doesn't tell him that any of them are demands -- just that Clint finally stopped running. The first condition is easy, because it was always SHIELD's plan. He recommends supervising Clint himself, but says that he's stable enough to stay in SHIELD quarters. At the end, he notes that Clint tends to rise to others' expectations of him, and he suggests keeping Clint's status as a slave quiet from the organization as a whole.

He doesn't bother mentioning the fourth condition. Clint's working in retrievals, not training, so on some level, it doesn't even matter what he thinks about slavery. All that matters is that he does his job.

And he does. Once Clint's been through training and gained back some of his muscle tone, he proves to have the same knack in the field that Phil has on paper. He notices everything, and he has an ability to predict and cut off escape routes that borders on uncanny. Phil finds quickly that he's not just supervising Clint out of obligation; he becomes one of Phil's favorite team members and partners in the field.

The one thing he avoids, whenever possible, is asking Clint to bring someone in.

 

...

 

It's easy for Phil to forget, as months lengthen to years, that Clint's a slave. The only commands he gives Clint are the kind he'd give any of his subordinates. If anything, he's even more careful around Clint than around the others, because he can see the way that Clint flinches and freezes at the sound of direct orders. And if Clint's banter on open comms leads to the rumor that Phil has a soft spot for SHIELD's best sharp-shooter, Phil considers that an acceptable trade-off.

By law, privacy doesn't exist for slaves. As an authorized representative of the corporation that owns Clint, Phil has the right to enter and search his quarters whenever he chooses. The law is part of why Phil avoids visiting them; every time he steps inside, he feels like he's taking advantage. (That's an incomplete truth, though. Every time he steps inside, he gets tempted to do the kinds of things that would be taking advantage. He's self-aware enough to admit that avoiding that temptation is at least half of why he stays away.)

Instead, Phil discovers to his mild consternation, Clint loves invading _his_ space. Clint writes his mission reports from Phil's office, sprawled comfortably on the floor with a swagger that has nothing of submission in it. He'll stop by Phil's office when he's between jobs and bored, demanding that Phil entertain him, and Phil finds that talking through his assignments with Clint helps him get fresh perspective. Sometimes, particularly after stressful ops, Clint shows up at Phil's apartment without warning. (Technically, he's not supposed to leave SHIELD without specific authorization, but Clint's been cooperative enough that everyone turns a blind eye.) They cook dinner together and watch TV from Phil's couch, and when Clint dozes off beside him, Phil tries to suppress the ache of how comfortable it all is, how easy it would be to lean over and wake him with a kiss.

Things get awkward sometimes, at first, but they learn to rely on questions to get around things. If Phil really needs some space, he'll phrase it as a question: "don't you have somewhere else to be?", not "get out of my office." If Clint thinks that Phil's wrong, but other people are around, he'll ask, "wouldn't the corner building offer better lines of sight after dark?", inserting a note of meek curiosity into his voice.

Clint doesn't hesitate to hold his ground when they're alone together; he'll tell Phil exactly how crazy he thinks his plans are. But he'll still use questions for the things that can't be said.

_"Did you see that news story about the slave who starved to death because her master wanted her to be his personal runway model?"_

_"Have you heard that abolitionist speech that the Montana congressman made?"_

_"Shouldn't you be going out and getting laid on a Friday night, not sitting in your office?"_

It's ironic, when Phil thinks about it. Clint uses questions to ask the precise things that Phil can't let himself answer.

 

...

 

They go on a mission to Mississippi, and the whole thing is a shitstorm.

Anne Marie Lawrence, a.k.a. "Rogue," had been one of SHIELD's success stories. When she manifested her mutation as an adolescent, allowing her to absorb the memories and abilities of anyone she touched, her masters were terrified of her; they sold her to SHIELD for a song. After a few years of training, education, research, and field-tested equipment, she was in control of her powers and ready to resell for a fortune. A charming couple from Mississippi bought her, explaining that her memory-extracting abilities would be useful for their investigations agency (more a hobby than a job, judging by the family investments they used to buy Rogue). They sent occasional updates to SHIELD, attaching photographs of Rogue happily at work for her new mistresses.

Turns out that the whole thing was a lie, and Phil is going to _kill_ someone in Client Screening when he gets home. Rogue's mistresses were mutants themselves, codenames Mystique and Destiny, and they'd been using Rogue to further a terrorist pro-mutant agenda. None of this came out until Rogue absorbed the powers of a superpowered woman named Carol Danvers, granting Rogue flight and extraordinary strength, leaving Danvers in a coma, and inserting the personality of a scrupulously upright Air Force officer into Rogue's brain. She ran away from her mistresses, prompting SHIELD's involvement, but she's refusing to come back in to the agency that sold her to them.

Today, that leaves Clint with his bow and arrows, trying to take down Rogue without getting in physical proximity, and Phil, staring at his orders that authorize lethal force. Rogue's a good kid, that much is obvious, and she might still have resale value after an appropriate period of care and reeducation. Phil doesn't want to hurt her. He just doesn't want to see her hurt anyone else.

Rogue's floating above the parking lot of a run-down strip mall, tears streaming down her face. The other three agents in Phil's team are all down on the ground around her, unconscious or worse, he doesn't know. Clint still has his position, aiming from the window of a second-floor dance studio, but he's only got one good shot before she comes after him too.

So Phil makes the call. "Take her down, Hawkeye," he says into his comm. "Make it count." _Make it a kill shot_ , he knows Clint will hear.

" _She's freaking out, sir,_ " Clint replies, voice tense. " _I think we can still talk her down._ "

"Ramirez, Carson, and Myers all tried talking. Take the shot, Clint."

" _Sir,_ " Clint acknowledges, his voice impenetrable, and his comm cuts out. From his secured position, Phil can see the swift arc of the arrow he looses; it hits Rogue, and she falls like a rock.

When he's confirmed that Rogue isn't moving, Phil approaches her fallen body cautiously. Motionless, her face looks even younger than her seventeen years. The single arrow rises from her torso.

Up close, though, Phil can see: the arrow hit her in the shoulder, not the heart. She's unconscious but alive. He bites back a curse and dutifully ignores the shuddering wave of relief.

At the debrief, Clint simply shrugs. "Sorry I missed," he says. _But you never miss,_ Phil doesn't say. _And if you screwed up somehow, you'd never act this unconcerned about it._

He doesn't say it, and he doesn't include it in his report. That night, when all the paperwork's been filed and Rogue's healing in an isolation chamber, he invites Clint over to share a bottle of decent whiskey. They get drunk.

Phil loses enough of his inhibitions to lean on Clint's shoulder and whisper about how he _hates_ selling kids, and then he tilts his chin up and tries to kiss him.

Clint pushes Phil's face away, gentle but unwavering. "I can't," he says.

As always, Phil spends the night alone.

 

...

 

The next day, Phil remembers everything that happened, with a shadow of flustered embarrassment, but Clint doesn't say a word about it. Phil won't bring it up; whatever Clint's reasons for turning him down, arguing them is only going to exploit the power differential that had made Phil hesitate to approach him in the first place.

They continue to work together, just like before.

Just like before, Phil sometimes feels Clint's eyes on him -- assessing, searching for something -- but he never suggests aloud that he changed his decision. It's better that way, Phil tells himself. Everyone knows that nothing good results from falling in love with a slave you don't own.

 

...

 

"Natasha Romanova," Fury tells Phil calmly, sliding a folder toward him. "The Black Widow. She was the Soviets' version of the Super Soldier experiments: a slave given superhuman enhancements and sent on government missions. They never tweaked the formula as well as we did, but she still looks twenty, so they got something right. When the Cold War ended, she ran away and started taking jobs as an independent operative."

Phil nods, opening the folder and skimming its contents. "Romanova" means that she was born an imperial slave before the 1917 revolution, making her at least in her eighties. Resistance to aging aside, that's a hell of a long time to survive in the world of covert operations, let alone as a slave. He reads over the list of operations in which her involvement was suspected, and his eyes narrow for a moment. "Shouldn't this information be top-secret?" SHIELD usually tries to stay on the good side of the U.S. government, after all.

Fury huffs a laugh. "The government's been trying to track her down and eliminate her for six decades. Somebody decided that they'd try outsourcing the job to the people who have more experience with hunting down slaves, so they sent her file to us."

"Should I start tracking my billable hours?" Phil says mildly, still reading her file.

"Cute. They're paying in information, not dollars."

Phil looks up and raises his eyebrows. Any information worth this job has to be absolutely irreplaceable.

A slow, knowing smile spreads across Fury's face. "They're promising us the location of Captain America."

 

...

 

Tracking down Natasha isn't easy, but Phil manages it. He manages it four times, in fact, and every time, the Black Widow slips through his fingers. With any other assignment, Phil would wash his hands and recommend that SHIELD sell her papers as a floater. But he can't let this go, even when Fury starts pulling him regularly for other missions. Partly, he's never given up on the myth of Captain America. With access to SHIELD's confidential research files, Coulson only became more impressed with the enhancements they gave him; privately, he thinks it's even possible that someone like that would have survived decades in the ice, given the right conditions. That's a possibility he can't abandon.

Partly, though, each time that Natasha evades Phil's efforts feels like a taunt, like a reminder that Phil still isn't quite the best at what he does. On the one hand, Phil doesn't like feeling incompetent. On the other hand, this woman is proving intoxicatingly competent. The combination's addictive.

One evening, Phil's grumbling about his latest dead end with Natasha. Clint listens, flipping a dagger between his hands with a juggler's flourish; he doesn't need to be here, but Phil doesn't mind the company. What he minds is this woman, this person without any of the vast resources of SHIELD and the world's fugitive-detection networks, outsmarting him time and time again. He sighs and lets his face rest in his hands, a sign of weakness that he only ever lets Clint see.

"I think I could get her for you," Clint says slowly.

Phil jerks his head up. Clint never does this. He's got the brains for strategy, but he's always avoided taking planning roles. Phil always figured that it helped him reconcile himself to his job; if all he did was take shots at people, then he was just following his orders. "And you'd do that?" he asks, trying not to sound too eager.

"Only if you let me talk to her before I take her down."

"She'll kill you if you get close enough to talk. I've seen her in action, Clint. She doesn't mess around."

"Then that's a risk I'll take."

_The risk isn't yours to take,_ Phil wants to say, and the thing is, he's right. Slaves don't get to risk their lives; that's gambling with a resource they don't own. But he knows, if he's being honest with himself, that the problem isn't about an ethical or legal restriction. The problem is that he's started thinking of Clint as his, not SHIELD's, and _he_ doesn't want to lose Clint.

The thought is so dangerous that Phil runs straight in the opposite direction. "Tell me the plan."

 

...

 

They find the Black Widow.

Clint speaks with her, his comm removed so Phil can't hear.

Natasha doesn't kill him.

Clint radios back that Natasha will come in peaceably if SHIELD doesn't give her to the government.

Phil never does find out what Clint said to her.

 

...

 

Somehow, God bless his manipulative soul, Fury manages to persuade the United States to let SHIELD keep Natasha, and he still comes out with the promised coordinates for Captain America's plane. SHIELD has to fund the expedition themselves, and the government gets to cart away everything they recover besides Cap's body, but it's still an incredible coup. Fury makes sure that Phil has full access to the operation planning.

Life is good.

There's a lot that Natasha won't tell SHIELD without interrogation techniques advanced enough to leave her value permanently diminished. That's fine, though; SHIELD is less interested in her history than in her potential. She flies through every test they give her and seems to have struck up a camaraderie with Clint, making her the first fellow slave that Phil's seen him befriend. Soon enough, she's cleared for active missions.

Meanwhile, Clint never stops giving Phil the same wistful looks when he thinks Phil isn't watching. He never makes a single overt move, either, and Phil lets it be. Clint has reasons for his choices. Maybe someday it'll help Phil feel appropriately detached.

Then they go on assignment to Budapest, and everything falls apart. The slave they're after holed himself up with an incredible amount of firepower and laced the surrounding neighborhood with explosives. By the time Phil realizes his plan, it's too late to get away. This man's not interested in escape; he's interested in taking out as many SHIELD operatives as possible and dragging them down to Hell with him.

"Mission aborted, everybody out," he yells into his comm unit from the supposedly safe distance of two blocks away. "I repeat, mission --"

His words are cut off by the office building exploding under his feet.

 

...

 

"You shouldn't be here," Phil mumbles when he opens his eyes. He'd woken to the familiar rhythm of hospital monitors -- this was hardly the first time that his job had landed him in the hospital -- and let himself catalogue his physical condition. It took a few moments to realize that he wasn't the only one breathing in the room, but when he pried his eyes open, the last person he expected to see was Natasha, sitting next to his bed with a pillow wedged between her head and the wall.

"Shouldn't be here," he repeats stupidly, tiredly. Corporate slaves as valuable as Natasha don't get wasted on sitting at someone's bedside.

"It's my shift," she replies, calm and entirely nonsensical. Even considering Fury's soft spot for Phil -- "Clint and I have been covering you. Twelve hours each, so no one can complain. And Fury hasn't given us any assignments outside New York." A very small smile quirks her cheek; clearly, she's aware of what a special dispensation that is. Even with them both giving SHIELD full twelve-hour work days, they can't have been optimally productive if they're getting all their sleep in a hospital chair.

It all makes sense, but thinking through the logic is making the pounding in Phil's head crescendo to a near-overpowering headache. "But why?"

"Clint asked me to," she says simply, as if that's answer enough.

Phil closes his eyes, which helps somewhat with his headache. Everything hurts; at a minimum, he can count multiple broken ribs, a sprained or broken wrist, a broken tibia, and the remnants of a concussion. He's really not going to enjoy the long stretch of desk work this is going to require.

Some period of time passes before he opens his eyes again, but Natasha is still sitting by the bed. He lets his mind process her comments at its own, currently groggy, pace. "But why's Clint having me watched?"

Natasha shoots him the kind of look that most slaves could never give most overseers -- the _even you can't be that stupid, can you?_ stare. Phil's gotten uncomfortably used to it. When he just stares back at her, still uncomprehending, she sighs. "Because the idiot's in love with you."

_That doesn't make sense,_ Phil thinks, and he's honestly not sure whether he's mouthing the words aloud. He focuses his thoughts. "Then why hasn't he --" He trails off. _Why didn't he kiss me? Why hasn't he said anything? He has to know I'd accept whatever he offered._

Her gaze remains unimpressed. "Have you tried asking him that question directly?"

Phil shakes his head. It feels like a particularly painful earthquake.

"Then I'm certainly not going to interfere. Get some sleep, Coulson."

He does.

 

...

 

The trick to talking through awkward subjects, Phil's found, is to blaze ahead with the perfect confidence that they're not awkward at all. Clint continues to make sure that Phil's never alone in the hospital, but his attitude in person is studiously disinterested, and in light of what Natasha said, Phil can't bear that any longer.

So the next time that Phil's alone in the hospital room with Clint (and feeling reasonably conscious), he turns off Lifetime and waits until he has Clint's full attention. "You've probably noticed that I have ... certain feelings for you," he says. His gaze is fixed upward, where it hurts his head least, but it has the bonus of avoiding Clint's eyes.

"You trying to kiss me was a strong positive indication," Clint agrees.

"And Natasha seems to think that those feelings are, to some extent, reciprocated."

"Natasha is an observant woman," he says, still careful.

Phil grits his teeth, then regrets it when that sends a fresh wave of pain through his head. He doesn't have the energy for games. "So why don't you -- why not?" he says finally, trusting that Clint will understand the full breadth of his question.

Clint pauses. When Phil glances over, he's gazing at the same empty spot of ceiling that Phil had been watching. "Your mother came and visited, while you were unconscious," Clint says. "She asked who I was, and I told her my name."

Phil nods, _Go on._

"She's a lovely woman. I can see where you get your fashion sense from. And she just looked at me and said, 'Oh, so _you're_ Phil's Clint.'" Clint mimics the bright politeness of Phil's mother perfectly. "Then she said that she's been trying to convince you to buy me for ages. She was so nice about it. Said she wouldn't trust just anyone with her baby."

Phil grimaces. "I'm not going to do that."

Clint nods, unsurprised, but asks, "Why not?"

With anyone else, the answer would've been simple: because Phil is a private man, and he doesn't want anyone else in his living space, not even someone he owns. But Clint's already sidled his way into Phil's life until he feels like an extension of his own self. With Clint, the answer is different. "Because you wouldn't want that. You said you didn't want another person owning you again."

Again, Clint nods. "But then why not buy me and free me?"

And _there_ it is. There's the question that some part of Phil has been expecting Clint to ask him for months. He could give the "right" answers: " _because I don't have the money to pay for that in full, and you know that manumission loans have rapacious interest rates._ " Or, more gracefully, " _because I know you're too proud to accept that kind of gift._ "

They're good answers, but Clint deserves the truth or nothing. The truth is, Phil knows all the stories. _Everyone_ knows someone who knew someone. Masters and mistresses convince themselves that it's true love, that their slave's devotion is genuine, so they emancipate them as a birthday gift, or an anniversary gift, or the prelude to a proposal. Then once the paperwork's complete, the slaves run away to a new life and new lovers -- and who can prosecute them for a deception of intent that won them their freedom? Who can blame them for wanting to see the world beyond their master's home? Their foolish owners should have known better; their only excuse is that love makes fools of everyone.

Phil doesn't want to be love's fool. He doesn't want to let go of his Hawk and watch him fly away for someone younger and more interesting. Clint seems genuine, of course he does; so does every slave promising their affection.

But of course he can't give Clint that truth, so instead he gives him nothing.

Clint nods a third and final time, satisfied, with a bitter twist in his smile. "And that's why I don't."

After that, there's nothing to say.


	3. Pepper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Important warning:** This chapter contains depictions of sex acts between a slaveowner and his slave. While the sex is not physically coerced, I would still characterize the situations as extremely dubious consent, and they may be triggering. Proceed with caution.

If anyone had ever asked, Pepper could have pinpointed the best day of her life. She was 17, and she came home from work late to find a fat envelope tossed on the dining table, _Stanford University_ on the return address.

"Mail for you," her dad said, without taking his eyes off the TV or his hand off the whiskey glass. Her mom didn't look up from her nail polish.

Pepper remembers the feelings bubbling inside her as she took the envelope to her room, elation and trepidation warring for dominance. She'd done the math and calculated margins of error (unexpected textbook costs, difficulty finding a job), and she knew precisely how good her scholarship would have to be for her to be able to accept.

Her fingers trembled ever so slightly as she opened the envelope and flipped to the page with dollar signs on it. Then she found it, and she covered her mouth to keep from gasping too loudly. _Need-based Financial Aid,_ the paper said, and then _Merit Scholarship_ , and the number was so large that she'd only need to take one job.

Pepper bit her lip and hugged the papers tight to her chest, feeling so glorious and radiant that she wondered if the glow shone through the cracks of her bedroom door.

 

...

 

" _Ginny, we're in trouble,_ " her dad said through the phone line, three years later. His voice slurred with alcohol, but the note of desperation and fear under it resonated strongly enough for Pepper not to complain about him using the name she hated. " _Real bad trouble. Your mom and me, we -- well, we had a plan to take care of the family, and it didn't go so well, and now we've got to pay up, and it's more than we've got._ "

A fear that didn't yet have a name drew Pepper's muscles taut. "I don't have much I can send you," she said with hesitation. The money order she'd sent last month had cleaned out most of the savings she had. "But I can always take a few extra shifts at work, and --"

Her dad cut her off with a rough, pained laugh. " _This ain't a matter of a few hundred dollars, sugar. It's -- it's a lot. And these guys need it real soon._ "

"What are you asking, dad?" The ice in Pepper's muscles seemed to be tightening around her throat, cutting off her oxygen.

" _Your mom and me would sell ourselves if it would help, I swear we would, but nobody's going to want two old bags of redneck bones. But Ginny, you're so pretty and so smart, and you've got most of your college degree -- you know it'd be enough._ "

Her face felt frozen too. She couldn't breathe. "You can't ask me to --"

" _They'll kill us if we don't pay up. That's the truth of it. That's what they said. I know we aren't real good parents, and I know it's more than it's fair to ask of you, but I don't know what else to do. I just don't know._ "

Something was blurring the room, refracting the lights into shards that stabbed Pepper's eyes. She wiped her face, and her hand came away salty and damp. "Okay," she said, choking on the word. "Okay."

 

...

 

"Now, remember," the woman with thick makeup and bottle-blonde hair told her, "you're a rare commodity. A cute little ruby gem. So what you've got to do is look real close at the buyers, and look for the ones who have kindness crinkled around their eyes. You meet their eyes, and you flash them that pretty smile, and you'll find yourself somewhere real nice."

Pepper didn't want to smile, not when she felt like she was falling apart. But she knew the kind of people who liked to buy young women who cried, and she couldn't go to a master like that, she just _couldn't_. So she walked gracefully, kept her mascara unsmudged, and tried to catch the eyes of the men who didn't look too old or too cruel.

 _If this goes too late, I'll never be able to finish my Marketing project,_ she thought, and then she almost broke down laughing helplessly, because she'd never have to turn in a school project again.

Her dealers had decided to emphasize her "girl next door" appeal, so her dress wasn't nearly as revealing as most of the other girls in her cohort. (She wasn't sure whether she envied or pitied the way that the buyers' gazes latched onto the rouged aureolas peeking above their crystal-trimmed necklines; at least it meant they didn't have to meet their eyes.)

For a group like hers -- young, pretty, female -- the buyers were mostly male, mostly middle-aged, universally wealthy. Some of them raked the merchandise with their eyes, but approached no one specific; others chatted with each girl, giving Pepper pick-up lines so horrible that her flirtatious smile felt glued in place. By the second hour of the silent auction, their faces had become a blur, and all she wanted was to pull off her heels, hide in her own bedroom, and scream into a pillow until her voice turned hoarse.

"What's the square root of 169?"

Pepper blinked, turned to the man who'd asked, and said, "Thirteen?"

He nodded. "What's the difference between a biannual event and a semiannual event?"

A hint of a genuine smile teased at her lips. Pepper had always been the teacher's pet, ready with quick answers, and it felt effortless to slip back into that skin. "'Biannual' means every two years, as in 'binary' or 'bisexual.' 'Semiannual' means half a year, as in 'semicircle' or 'semiconductor,' so it's an event occurring twice a year." Her nose crinkled. "But I find it's best to confirm the actual dates, because people misuse them as often as not."

The man's grin reflected her own. He was in the older end of the buyer demographics, gray-haired, with a mustache that probably looked much more dashing when he was forty years younger. _Kindness_ , the woman had said -- there wasn't much of that in the detached calculation of his gaze. But he didn't look cruel, at least, and his eyes felt more probing than lascivious.

"Last question," he said. "Suppose your master had a morning meeting on his schedule, but he woke up hungover and told you he'd rather spend the morning enjoying your company. What would you do?"

Pepper pursed her lips and contemplated the question. Clearly, the man had correct and incorrect answers in mind, but she supposed that honesty would minimize the odds of a mismatch. "I guess it would depend on how important the morning meeting was. If he really needed to be there, I'd drag him out of bed, make him presentable, and kick him out the door. I'd rather get blamed for making him do the right thing than for letting him do the wrong thing."

"Very good," the man said. She'd picked the correct answer, then. "I'll be giving you to my son; he just graduated from college, and he needs to learn how to be an adult. The brat never listens to me, but I think he'd pay more attention to you." He peered at Pepper's nametag. "Virginia, hunh?"

"Everyone calls me Pepper," she blurted, and the man laughed.

"Fiesty. It suits you. I'll see you later, Pepper."

An hour later, she watched him sign the last piece of paperwork with a careless scrawl, and that was it. Virginia Potts no longer existed, legally; her new name was Pepper Stark.

 

...

 

When Pepper heard "graduated from college," she expected someone her age, remembering the entitled jerks from her Business classes. What she got was a 17-year-old kid wearing an oil-stained t-shirt and a valiant attempt at a goatee. Master Stark had flown her across the country in a first-class seat, bundled her into a limo to the family mansion, then passed off her luggage to a butler and taken her straight to the basement. The vast space was so cluttered with wires and metal parts and half-built robots that it took her a few seconds to notice the teenager hunched over a keyboard, staring at what looked like green text on a black television screen.

"Tony!" Master Stark barked, and the kid jerked upward and looked back at the two. His eyes skated over his father and honed in on Pepper, blatantly ogling her curves. "This is Pepper. She'll be your new personal assistant. It's time you started acting like an adult, if you ever want to take over the company."

The younger Stark rolled his eyes and turned back to his keyboard. "You shouldn't have, Dad. Seriously. You actually shouldn't have."

"Well, I did. You need to spend more time out of this hole, learning to run a business, and Pepper's going to help you do that. I won't be around forever, you know."

"I know," he groaned. "Jesus, dad. I don't even have anywhere to keep her."

Master Stark didn't bother to dignify that with a response; he simply turned and strode out of the room, leaving Pepper watching the young man's back as he resumed typing. With nothing else to do, she started to read over his shoulder, where he typed a structured mishmash of English words and odd abbreviations. A phrase clicked into place: _computer language._

Twenty minutes later, she gently cleared her throat. "Um. I could be wrong, but shouldn't there be a closing parenthesis two lines up?"

The typing stopped. "Fuck, you're right," he said, quickly correcting the error. "You know how to program?"

"Not really," she shrugged, "but it reminded me of my mathematical logic class. Symmetry just made sense."

"Hunh. Guess ole' dad had decent taste, at least. You know lots of kinky sex moves, too?"

"Not really."

"Damn. Well, I still don't need you. Go upstairs and ask Jarvis -- he's the butler -- to take care of you. Then, I don't know, you can wait naked in my bedroom or something."

Pepper could feel her cheeks go scarlet, but he'd already turned back to the computer, and she didn't want to start her life with the Starks on the wrong foot. So she left.

She didn't sleep for hours that night, lying naked and self-conscious in a bed more luxurious than any she'd ever touched. Every time she started to drift off, she'd hear a quiet sound and wake up, arrested by the fear that the young Master had arrived. Eventually, though, the pillowy mattress and the exhaustion of the week swept her into a sound sleep, curled up on one edge of the bed under silk sheets.

Pepper woke up in the morning with a jolt of adrenaline and glanced across the bed. She wasn't alone. Tony Stark lay on the far edge, still wearing his ratty t-shirt, sound asleep.

Trying not to tug at the bedsheets enough to wake him, Pepper let herself wrap her arms around her own chest and cry in relief.

 

...

 

As Pepper discovered the next morning, part of the reason for her reprieve was that Tony Stark had a one-track mind, and at the moment, that track was fixed on a pile of twitching metal that Tony, with more frustration than affection, called "Dummy." Pepper gathered from observation and gentle inquiry that Dummy was designed to be an all-purpose independent helper robot, like an electronic slave. It made the younger Stark's resentment about her even more understandable.

So she made the best of the situation she had. Master Stark seemed capable of working 20 hours a day on his own, but he spent those 20 hours much more calm and friendly if Pepper kept him well-caffeinated and well-fed and steered away unwanted guests. In between the tasks of tending her owner, she tried to learn more about her new life. Howard Stark seemed supremely uninterested in her, now that she'd been passed on to Tony, and his unofficial second-in-command, one Master Obadiah Stane, had a rapacious smirk in his eyes that gave Pepper chills. Jarvis, one of a half-dozen other slaves living in the Stark mansion, proved more useful for orienting herself, although he primly refused to divulge personal data or speculation.

The first time that Pepper got called into Master Stark's office, he slapped her hard in the face and verbally eviscerated her for the fact that Tony had blown off a Stark Industries board meeting that morning, a meeting at which he was scheduled to be the main presenter. Pepper hadn't even known about the meeting.

She bit her lip at the painful imprint on her cheek, and she realized that she had two choices: she could start crying right now, or she could let herself snap back, even if it'd end up in being punished until she cried more later. Pepper made her decision.

She met Master Stark's eyes. "You want me to keep Master Tony in line? Fine. But he doesn't even want me there, so if you want me to get him to his meetings, you need to tell _me_ about them. I can't function properly without information."

Master Stark stared for a long moment, but he didn't slap her a second time. "Fine," he said at last, dismissively, and waved his hand. "Tell Colin that I'm making you the primary contact for scheduling with Tony, so he'll need to brief you on Tony's responsibilities." Then he strode back to sit at his desk and unrolled a blueprint, clearly finished with Pepper for the time being.

Pepper did three things right then. She walked out of his office and closed the door behind her. She leaned against the wall of the antechamber, trembling like a late-clinging leaf, until her body felt completely under her control again. Then she stepped into Colin's office -- right next door, as befit Master Stark's personal body slave -- and laid out lines of communication for the future.

 

...

 

Her second night at the mansion, Pepper had hesitated delicately at bedtime. "Should I ..." she'd started to ask, then trailed off; part of her had been afraid that saying the words " _wait naked for you again_ " would plant the idea in Master Tony's head, make it more real.

But he'd just shrugged, never looking away from the joint he was welding. "Yeah, sure, same as last night. Maybe Dad'll stop worrying that the Stark heir's a faggot."

 _So are you one?_ Pepper had wanted to ask, but she hadn't said another word. Regardless, even though she undressed and waited dutifully in his bed, Master Tony still didn't touch her that night, or the next, or the next. Half the time, she didn't even notice him coming to bed.

In her second week at the Stark mansion, Pepper woke up in the middle of the night to an uneasy silence. The bedsheets had slid down in her sleep, leaving her exposed from the waist up, and Master Tony lay on his side, staring intently at her naked breasts and looking even younger than his seventeen years. She must have twitched, because his eyes flickered up to her face, taking in her awake state, then returned to her breasts.

He reached out a finger, tracing around one aureola; her nipple began to harden automatically at the cool touch. "Yours aren't very big," he said, with a note of mild curiosity.

Pepper focused every ounce of willpower on staying still. _Don't tremble. Don't flinch. Don't cry. This will be over soon._ Despite her own admonitions, her eyes squeezed shut. She'd begun to like Master Tony, in all his arrogant, awkward, infuriating brilliance. She didn't want to see this moment when she looked at him the next day.

His hand withdrew, and after a long moment of stillness, Pepper ventured to open her eyes. Master Tony was watching her, a perturbed half-scowl on his lips. "Why're you crying?" he asked. "I'm not going to hurt you."

She touched one hand to her cheek, surprised to feel it damp. She didn't, couldn't, say anything.

"You're not a virgin or something, are you?"

Pepper shook her head.

"Jesus, normally I can't shut you up. Okay. Is this some kind of performance anxiety thing? Here, I can show you." Master Tony grasped her hand, not too roughly, and guided it down to his penis. He was mostly soft when she touched him, but he started to harden right away.

Pepper stifled a hysterical giggle about the responsiveness of teenage boys. She could do this. She could. It clearly wouldn't take much, after all. Slowly, as though moving through mud, she wrapped her fingers around to grasp him fully, and Master Tony's hips twitched toward her in response. His eyelids sank half-closed in response, with a soft sigh. "Yeah. That's awesome. Just keep doing it like that."

She couldn't breath. If she breathed, she'd sob or choke, she'd kill the mood. All she had to do was focus and stroke him, and if she did it well enough, maybe he wouldn't -- and then Master Tony put his hand back on Pepper's breast, and she flinched away hard, a desperate whimper crawling out of her throat.

"What the fuck ever," Tony said, a grouchy note in his voice, but he removed his hand and rolled over to the other side of the bed. After a couple of minutes, Pepper could hear a rhythmic rustling coming from his side of the bed, punctuated by the occasional cut-off gasp. It only lasted for a couple of minutes before dissolving into a deep exhalation, and soon after that, his breathing smoothed out into sleep.

Pepper curled up under all the blankets she could reach. Even though she knew the room wasn't cold, she couldn't stop shivering.

 

...

 

The next night, Master Tony left the mansion around the time that Pepper was going to bed, dressed in shiny form-fitting clothes that made him look like an older man pretending to be the seventeen years that he actually was. He stumbled into his bedroom several hours later, voice giggling loud with alcohol, a barely-clothed girl on his arm. Master Tony turned on the light, making Pepper blink with the shock of it, and the girl wrinkled her nose at the sight of Pepper. "Who's she?"

He rolled his eyes dismissively. "Just my slave." He waved his arm toward the door. "What the hell are you still doing here, Pep? I think that the lady and I would like some _privacy_." He finished his statement with a clumsy squeeze of the girl's ass, and she giggled in response.

Pepper wasn't going to ask twice. She cast her eyes around the room for something to wear, but she'd left her clothes in the laundry hamper across the room, and she knew better than to steal one of Tony's sheets just for her own legally-nonexistent privacy. So she set her jaw, rolled out of his bed, and walked out of the room, stark naked and deliberately unaffected.

She had a bedroom of her own next door, where she kept her clothes, but she'd never slept in it before. Once she'd entered it closed the door, she pulled on her coziest pair of plaid flannel pajamas, kept from her old life, and slipped under the bedcovers. For a brief moment, she let herself stretch all her limbs at once, like a bird in flight, and touched nothing but linens. _Just me,_ she told herself, the thought a thrilling relief.

Despite the occasional thumps and moans from next door, Pepper slept better than she had since she'd sold herself away.

 

...

 

After that, things got easier. The weekly rhythms of the Stark mansion became more familiar and predictable; Colin informed her of which Stark Industries events were mandatory, and Pepper nudged and hassled Master Tony into attending them. In the meantime, she ensured that he stayed (relatively) well-fed and well-rested, served as a sounding-board for his ideas, and took care of anything too boring for his attention, whether ordering machine parts or sending tasteful day-after bouquets to his liaisons. He brought home "dates" every few nights -- always female, always pretty -- but when Pepper asked where he wanted her on the other nights, he just shrugged, not looking away from his surface grinder. "Wherever. You twitch in your sleep." As far as Pepper was concerned, that translated to _you can sleep in your bedroom for the foreseeable future,_ and she barely refrained from hugging him in gratitude.

Tony finished building Dummy, which never quite acquired a better name, and made a new AI slavebot with smarter programming -- only to discover that its code exceeded its mechanical precision, earning it the name "Butterfingers." Pepper liked the slavebots; they really did act more like slaves than machines, learning their master's preferences and showing the occasional endearing quirk. Dummy remained Master Tony's favorite, but Pepper liked Butterfingers best. Sometimes the bot would get visibly frustrated when it knew perfectly well how to do a task, but didn't have the dexterity to do what needed to be done. Pepper could relate.

She discovered eventually that the AIs had only been able to occupy Master Tony's time because he'd persuaded his father that they were financially useful to Stark Industries -- the potential to build not just "smart bombs" but smart bombers. Stark Industries R&D dabbled in a wide range of fields, from biochemistry to human engineering to pure computer science, but all their primary clients and contracts were military.

So when, after being pressed, Master Tony confessed to Master Stark that his AIs would never be appropriate for commercial production -- too much slow-moving experiential learning required to get them functional -- Pepper had watched him endure a ten-minute lecture about irresponsible use of time.

Then Master Stark turned to Pepper and began to vent similar ire. As soon as he got to the point of suggesting "selling you off and getting someone who can do the damn job I bought you for," Master Tony stepped forward and met his father glare for glare.

"Are you fucking kidding me, dad? Just tell me what you want me to invent, and I'll get the plans to R&D. But I am not going to let you foist off yet another new person into my personal space to punish me for having the slightest shred of intellectual curiosity."

And that was that. After the argument, Master Tony still kept toying with his own projects, but he made sure that Pepper reminded him to send off at least one marketable prototype every month. It didn't stop the regular lectures from Master Stark, but at least it stole some of their ammunition.

Pepper could never quite describe the rush of emotion that had twisted her stomach when Master Tony refused to sell her -- and she'd known him long enough to understand that his statement had boiled down to that resolution, albeit couched in studied nonchalance. The feeling wasn't quite gratitude, though she knew she had it better than most slaves in her position, and it wasn't quite disappointment, though it had neatly sliced through any shreds of self-delusion that Master Tony was unhappy with being a slaveowner.

When she was a kid, Pepper's favorite part of fourth grade had been caring for the hamster that Mrs. Perez kept in the classroom. The hamster, whose name Pepper could no longer remember, had a good life; Mrs. Perez ensured that none of the kids squeezed it too hard or dangled it by its tail, and Pepper helped keep its cage, a repurposed aquarium, clean and well-stocked. Most of the time, the hamster seemed happy with its existence: running in its wheel, napping in its nest of fluff, nibbling on food pellets and the occasional sunflower seed. But once in a while, the hamster's gut instincts kicked in -- the need to burrow, to seek privacy and safety -- and it would scrabble at the bottom corners of the cage, paws sliding ineffectively off the glass walls. The hamster would bite and scratch and dig with all its energy, sometimes for long minutes at a stretch, before it gave in to the knowledge that the glass was never going to give. Then the hamster would calmly walk across the cage and start to run in its wheel again.

For a moment, when Master Tony asserted his ownership, Pepper felt something clawing in her chest like that hamster, desperate and resentful of how easy she'd found it to accept her life. _I have to get myself out of here,_ she'd thought wildly, _because nobody else ever will._

But digging through the glass took effort she couldn't spare, not when she had to work morning to night to keep Master Stark happy and Master Tony on her side. Not when the glass felt just as immutable, no matter which angle she attacked. So she tried to keep her wheel running and to savor the treats she received: shoes and clothes she'd only seen on runway models, business trips in hotels that treated even slaves better than a poor kid like her had ever received.

She savored the treats, and she tried to ignore the voice that kept screaming at her to dig, dig, dig out of her cage.

 

...

 

Another two years passed, without any tangible change to Pepper's fortunes. Master Tony continued to frustrate his father and delight their stockholders in equal measures. He also continued to bring home half-clad socialites, but Pepper discovered, the first time that they visited Amsterdam together, that his preferences were more equal-opportunity when out from his father's wing.

Master Tony's taste in women was so mainstream as to be a stereotype: blonde, slender, well-dressed, and high-spirited. The men he brought back to his hotel rooms fit a more particular pattern. Often tall, often rippling with muscles, they shared one mandatory trait: the gleam of calm, unwavering _command_ in their eyes.

Their hotel in Amsterdam had housed them in a standard luxury suite, with a one-way intercom linking the ensuite slave quarters to the master bedroom, in case the owners needed to call for help during the night. It meant that Pepper could hear it the moment that Master Tony returned, deep into the witching hour, with someone who murmured to him in a Dutch-accented baritone.

" _Such a pretty boy,_ " the man said, and he did something that made Master Tony whimper pleasurably. " _You will look much prettier stretched open around my dick._ "

" _God, yes,_ " Master Tony replied. " _Please. Tell me what you want, and I'll do it, I'll do anything, just please touch me, please --_ "

Pepper knew that he knew she could hear them, whether or not his companion was aware. She wasn't used to hearing Master Tony like this, all the cockiness evaporated from his voice and replaced by eager begging, but she told herself not to call hotel security until she heard the word " _no_."

She never heard it that night. She heard gasps of pleasurable pain, slaps of hands on skin, squelches of lubricant, even the choked wetness of tears, but never " _no_."

It took Pepper a long time to fall asleep that night, once the other room had gone silent. Eventually -- after Sydney and Tel Aviv, Munich and San Francisco -- she got used to the routine, no matter how much it made her skin prickle. It reassured her, in a roundabout way, because Master Tony was always at his most content after those encounters; he'd smile lazily over his morning coffee. It meant that whatever he was seeking most, he couldn't take it from her.

 

...

 

Then the December of her third year came, bringing perpetual gray skies, bone-chilling rain, and roads slick with patches of black ice. Jarvis wasn't often called to be the Starks' chauffeur, ordinarily busy with his household tasks, but this particular social function was in a private home in the Hamptons, too far to drive there and back in one evening. So they informed Tony that they'd be spending the night away, and Master and Mistress Stark took Jarvis to attend them at their otherwise-empty summer house.

Pepper had been woken by the phone ringing, over and over, from Master Tony's bedroom. Eventually, she pulled herself out of bed and entered his room, where the bed was unsurprisingly empty; he'd been deep into his still-unnamed latest AI project, a bodiless system designed to interface with household appliances and coordinate the slavebots. " _Like an electronic butler,_ " he'd explained.

Pepper picked up the phone. "Stark household," she said, forcing her half-awake voice into crisp professionalism.

" _Good evening; this is the Winthrop-University Hospital Emergency Room. May I speak to Tony Stark?_ "

"Of course," Pepper said, brain swiftly processing the implications. "Let me put you on hold."

She walked down to the workshop, turned off the ear-rattling music, and handed Master Tony the phone handset. Whatever he saw in her face stopped his complaints on his lips.

She waited while the woman spoke to him, the blood draining slowly from his face. "Okay," he said finally. "Okay." Another long pause; Pepper couldn't make out what the woman was saying. "I don't _care_ that he's a slave, and if your hospital's going to have that attitude, then I'll have him fucking transferred to somewhere that knows how to treat its patients, and you _will_ read about it in the newspapers." He exhaled fiercely, listening again. "Yeah, you'd better."

Pepper continued to wait, unsure whether to move toward or away from him, while the woman spoke for another long spell. Master Tony's free hand was clenching the fabric of his pants, tightening until his knuckles turned white. "How the hell should I know what they wanted?" he finally burst in.

Guessing at the current subject of conversation, Pepper tilted her head toward the phone questioningly. Master Tony handed it over with a brief expression of relief. "Ma'am, this is Pepper Stark," Pepper cut in. "I'll put you in touch with Colin, Master Stark's body slave. He'll be able to take care of any arrangements. Could you give me the best number to call you back?" The woman did, and Pepper memorized it quickly. "Thank you. Good night." Pepper hung up.

She looked at Tony silently, and he looked back, hand still fisted and taut. "They're dead," he said at last. "Both of them. Car accident on Long Island. Jarvis is in intensive care, but they don't expect him to make it either."

"I'm so sorry," Pepper breathed, because it was the thing to say. She wasn't sure how she felt about Master Stark, who treated his son like a slave and his slaves like machines, or Mistress Stark, who had retreated from the world into a soft-edged haven of whiskey and wine. But she would miss Jarvis, she thought.

Master Tony still hadn't moved. "You're not sorry, but that's all right. I'm not sorry either."

"That's not true."

"C'mon, Pep," he laughed hoarsely. "You're too smart for self-deception. He was an asshole, and she was a drunk, and -- god. God." Master Tony sounded like he was choking on his own breath.

Acting on instinct, Pepper knelt beside him and wrapped her arms around him; hugging him tight, she could feel the fine trembles shaking his body. "It'll be okay," she murmured, stroking his back. "It'll be okay." She kept holding him, kept stroking, as his gasps turned into wet sobs and Master Tony cried hard enough to shake her body and soak through the shoulder of her pajamas.

As he wept, she ran through plans in her mind. Colin would have to be told, and he could take care of informing Master Stane, the Board, and the rest of the household. She'd have to discuss the running of Stark Industries; Master Tony had never shown interest in its day-to-day operations, even though he was technically old enough to take over. A media response would have to be written, and they'd have to decide what to do with the Stark mansion. And -- she paused her train of thoughts when she realized that the sobs had quieted to occasional sniffles, but Master Tony still hadn't pulled away. Her knees were sore.

"Let's get you to bed," she said, standing up slowly without letting go, so she could help him upward.

"Stay with me?" he asked. His voice sounded tiny and almost pathetic.

Pepper hadn't slept in Master Tony's bed in years, but she wasn't going to deny him comfort tonight. "Of course," she soothed, and she helped him upstairs to the bedroom, one arm around his waist keeping him upright and moving.

Once upstairs, she peeled off his socks and jeans. "Getting pretty handsy there," he teased, but his mood was so far from light that the words simply sounded hollow.

"You know you like it," she retorted, giving the words a twist of a smile. Then she guided them both under the covers, turned out the remaining light, and cradled his body in hers from behind. At twenty, he'd reached his adult height, but he still felt small, skinny with too many skipped meals. He hadn't stopped trembling.

"I won't miss them," he said, soft and defiant.

She just kept holding him and pressed a kiss to the back of his neck. "You don't have to. Just take care of yourself now."

A soft sigh escaped his mouth when she kissed him, and after a brief hesitation, he twisted around to kiss her fully but tentatively on the lips. She could feel him stirring, a pressure against her thigh through boxers and pajama pants, and she remembered the touch of hot skin under her fingers, two and a half years ago.

 _I'm not the person I was back then,_ she told herself, and she didn't let herself flinch away from the contact. Master Tony deserved this; it was the least she could do for him right now. So she kissed him back, and she slid her hand down to cradle his ass, and she let him pull up her camisole to expose her breasts. She let him mouth at her neck, sloppy and urgent, and she rolled him on his back to straddle him in the position she'd learned he preferred with men and women alike.

Pepper hadn't had sex in almost three years, but the motions of it still felt familiar. _Like riding a bike. Push down onto the pedals, keep your balance, aim true._ Master Tony's hips felt bony, jutting sweatily into her thighs as she rocked on them. She'd have to make sure he skipped fewer meals.

He didn't take long to finish, and when he did, a fresh round of tears distorted his face, and he looked away. So Pepper pulled off him, kissed his forehead and then his lips, and held him until he slept.

 

...

 

Pepper woke early the next morning, but Master Tony had already left. She found him downstairs, typing computer code faster than her eyes could follow it. "Jarvis died," he said, without looking at her. "The hospital called two hours ago. Thought you'd want to know." He spoke in a quick monotone, underlined with the faintest tremble.

Pepper simply nodded. She'd never seen him this bad, but at least it was a relatively safe form of escapism. She'd talk to Colin about the details. (God, what would happen to Colin? Master Tony'd never been fond of him. Would she be expected to negotiate a sale? Would Master Tony sell her, too, now that his father wasn't around to insist on a slave?)

She left the workshop and began to plan how to manage the transition. Master Tony wasn't going to take the reins willingly, clearly, and Pepper didn't entirely trust anyone else to do the job. Perhaps, if she made herself invaluable enough, she wouldn't have to go through this all over again.

 

...

 

(Much later, Pepper would discover that Jarvis had died of trauma-induced internal injuries. An organ transplant might have saved him, but as per hospital policy, slaves always stayed at the bottom of the donor priority list. It was a simple matter of triage.

Pepper made sure that no Stark donations ever went to that hospital again. It wasn't enough.)

 

...

 

Master Tony -- Pepper still couldn't think of him as Master Stark -- spent the next week buried in his workshop, while Pepper took care of the arrangements and dragged him out to attend the funeral and the reading of the will. The latter answered at least one question: Master Stark had written a provision for Colin, providing him with manumission papers and a small pension. Otherwise, the household stayed as it was. To no one's surprise, but to Master Stane's swiftly hidden dismay, Master Stark had left the entirety of Stark Industries to his son.

Pepper suspected that Master Stane wouldn't have that much to be disappointed about, in practice. Master Tony'd shown no indications of interest in deeper involvement with the running of Stark Industries, which left Master Stane in de facto control of the business. Master Stane seemed to possess plenty of business savvy, even if his eyes did make her skin crawl.

Life, in its stumbling way, continued. She continued to join Master Tony in bed -- not every night, and not exclusively, but often enough. Often enough for her to learn his likes and preferences, and the fact that his dick got hardest when he _wasn't_ ostensibly the one calling the shots. She learned how to read when he wanted her to pin down his body and order him to lick her cunt, or to tie him up for a blowjob that moved excruciatingly slowly, no matter how he begged.

She also learned that her heart would never fully be in those games, and that she couldn't hide it, and that he could tell. Perhaps she'd enjoy them more in another context; she was never sure. But as things stood, the bitter farce of make-believe rubbed her wrong. She could tell Master Tony what to do, as long as it fell under a careful rubric of things he already wanted her to do. Bound, blindfolded, whipped, and pleading, he would always still have more freedom.

 

...

 

Years passed, but little changed.

Master Tony continued to churn out blueprints that sent shivers of awe through the R&D department, and he continued to treat his own body with reckless disdain. He'd cling to Pepper sometimes, late at night, and whisper to her about how she was everything to him, while he stroked her sex-tangled hair. He told her to call him Tony. Sometimes he forgot that she was even a slave, she suspected.

(Pepper never forgot.)

Her personal expense account grew every year, and she let herself use it to buy every beautiful thing that she'd never been able to afford. Housing, food, and necessities were already covered by the upkeep and maintenance budget for her contract, so the extra money that Tony threw her, wealthy enough to be careless in his generosity, went far.

(Not far enough. She calculated, once, how long she'd need to save up to buy herself, given her good health and increasingly irreplaceable work experience. The number of years was great enough that she decided that it made more sense to cushion the life she had with luxuries. As each year passed, though, she wondered if she'd made the right decision.)

Stark Industries continued to nurture its military contracts, but it expanded into the increasingly lucrative field of slave management tech. Barbaric corporal punishment was illegal, of course -- none of the beatings and brandings and mutilations of the old days -- but owners would always pay extra for the latest technology to "tame, treat, and track" their slaves, as the advertisements went.

Years passed, but little changed.

 

...

 

The morning of Pepper's thirty-sixth birthday began uneventfully. Pepper escorted out Tony's latest overnight guest, a blonde reporter who'd left thin nail lines down his back, then shooed out Tony himself for his flight to Afghanistan. She had a half-day at the spa scheduled for herself, and she didn't want to be late.

The receptionist knew Pepper at the spa she favored, but she still raised her eyebrows a hair when she saw the luxurious day she'd booked. "Your master's certainly splurging on you this time. You must've been a very good girl this year."

"Yes," Pepper said with a tight smile, "I have been."

The woman -- Cynthia, right -- just smiled back cheerfully, tucking a strand of artificially red hair behind her ear. "You know, I've never believed what they say about slaves being lazier workers. If some of the beauticians here were half as competent as you, we wouldn't even need slaves."

"Well, thank you." Pepper gritted her teeth without letting her smile waver. "I'll sit down over here while I wait, then."

(The compliments were always the worst.)

 

...

 

Twelve hours later, a phone call woke her up, and Lt. Rhodes told her gently that Tony had been taken in a fire fight, status unknown.

Three months later, it was his voice that told her Tony would be coming home.

Pepper doesn't like to think about the time in between. She and Happy, Tony's driver-cum-bodyguard, kept the household going, much of which consisted of fending off lawyers who kept trying to have Tony declared dead, while trying to persuade each other that Tony really _wasn't_ dead.

Once or twice, late at night in her empty bed, Pepper asked herself the what-ifs. What if Tony had put a clause in his will for her, like Master Stark had for Colin, and his confirmed death would mean her freedom? She'd grown fond of him, in the way she might be fond of an overgrown puppy who could knock the breath out of her with one careless paw. She didn't want Tony dead. But those what-ifs fed a deep, distant part of her, watering roots long abandoned and arid. What if a simple police declaration would make her free?

It didn't matter, in the end. Tony came back, sunburned and haggard and concealing a glowing machine embedded in his chest, and he declared that Stark Industries would be pulling out of the weapons market.

 _Oh,_ Pepper told herself, her bitterness uninhibited in the initial shock. _So he'll be focusing on slave tech._ After all, it was the second biggest source of income from the company.

Some part of her felt selfish; slave tech didn't kill people, and guided missiles did. The shift was well-intentioned and ethically admirable.

But for those first few seconds, Pepper didn't care.

 

...

 

Tony, in all his brilliant idiocy, made himself into Iron Man.

Pepper watched and tried to keep him from killing himself in the process.

 

...

 

Exactly one good thing came out of the whole horrible mess, in the end. With the shift to slave tech (exactly as she'd predicted), Stark Industries was increasingly courted by SHIELD, and they deployed one of their secret weapons: Phil Coulson, a man who waited politely, and smiled politely, and didn't hesitate to pull out a sidearm and call in reinforcements when everything fell apart. His choice of employer notwithstanding, Pepper found herself grudgingly impressed.

(They had coffee a few times, after the crisis had been averted -- nothing romantic, just companionship. The fact that he'd have coffee with someone else's slave already marked Phil as an oddity, and Pepper's curiosity only increased when Pepper inquired into his personal relationships. "I live alone," Phil said flatly, end of subject. Only one thing seemed to break his mild, unemotional composure, and that was the texts he'd occasionally get on his phone; half the time, they heralded a swiftly-concealed smile that crinkled his eyes. Pepper didn't want to pry; she was just pleased that he wasn't quite as alone as he claimed.)

 

...

 

Six months later, as Tony was becoming increasingly reckless and withdrawn with no obvious cause, he went in front of a Congressional committee to declare that he was the suit, then came home to tell Pepper that he'd decided to make her CEO of Stark Industries.

Pepper just stared at him. "Tony, you can't be serious. You can't do that."

"Why not?" Tony shrugged and swallowed a mouthful of the green sludge he'd been drinking for his latest health kick. "You already run the company already, and everyone important knows it. I don't care what the prejudiced assholes think; do you?"

Pepper closed her eyes for a moment, carefully silencing every voice in her that was goading her to slap Tony in the face for his naivete. "No, I mean that you literally _can't_. We're incorporated in New York, and New York corporation code prohibits slaves as officers of companies that employ more than fifty people."

Tony blinked. "Well, that's a stupid law."

"They claimed it would help stop slaveowners from circumventing monopoly and taxation laws by having multiple CEOs in their possession." Pepper sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. "The _point_ is that it's the law, and there's no way that a company as big as yours could break it without getting caught."

"Yeah, whatever." Tony paused for a moment, and anyone else might have assumed he was just thinking through strategies, but Pepper knew him. She'd seen him make decisions like this for years upon years, and she knew that a pause like that meant that he was wrestling with whether to say something big, something irrevocable. "I could free you," he said quietly. "That would solve the problem."

Pepper stood very still. "Don't joke about that, Tony. Don't say it unless you mean it."

His eyes met hers straight on, wide with vulnerability. "If I set you free, would you leave me?"

She hesitated. The easy answer, the obvious answer, was "no," whether or not it was true. Pepper had been waiting for this moment for over a decade, and God only knew when it would come again. Pepper bit her lip and wondered how hard it would be to lie to Tony.

"If you free me," she said at last, "you'll have to treat me like it. I won't always do what you tell me, and I'll want a life of my own. But if you can respect all that, then yes, I'll stay." She forced a small smile. "I like JARVIS too much to make him take care of you all on his own."

Tony shook his head, responding to her hesitance rather than her words. "Just give me two months. That's all I need. Two months, and then you can go."

"All right," she said numbly. "All right. I'll do it."

Two days later, Pepper Potts, née Stark, was a free woman and the CEO of the fourth-largest company in America.

 

...

 

The next week, while Tony worked up a sweat in the boxing ring, a gorgeous redhead in a too-tight white blouse walked into Pepper's life.

Well, technically, she walked into Tony's life. "I want one," Tony purred, and Pepper fussed and objected and deliberately ignored the deliciously rebellious thought: _I want one, too._

The woman's name was Natalie, a freewoman from Legal, and she could speak Latin, model lingerie, and knock Happy to the floor in three seconds flat. Pepper was a little bit in love. The best part, though? She could flirt with Natalie all she wanted, and there was absolutely nothing Tony could do to stop her.

( _Sometimes, when nobody's looking, she's got this smile that's so far away, and I wish I could follow her there,_ she told Phil, during their next coffee date.

He nodded thoughtfully and sipped his Americano. _She sounds like a remarkable woman._ )

 

...

 

Pepper watched Natalie flirt with Tony -- through Monaco and the madman wielding electric whips, through his birthday party and its orgy of self-destruction -- and by the time that she'd lost all patience and told Natalie that she'd report to Pepper instead, she thought she knew how Natalie flirted. She would have noticed if Natalie were directing that sort of attention at her, she was certain.

Pepper was wrong.

She was wrong about several things, actually -- including Natalie's real name, her real employer, and her real indenturement status. If she hadn't also been breathtakingly competent under pressure, Pepper might have been angry; as it was, she felt mere rueful appreciation, like an audience volunteer tricked by a professional magician. Happy told her later that Natalie -- Natasha -- had singlehandedly stormed a secure facility in a black catsuit, and Pepper merely sighed and smiled, wishing she could have seen.

The last thing that Pepper expected was to find Natasha waiting at her dining table when she got home, two weeks later. (She'd used the major damage to Tony's house as an excuse to get her own place, now that she was free. She spent a good ten minutes, on the day she moved in, turning around and whispering, " _Mine._ ") Natasha looked up casually, like they'd been having a conversation, and Pepper had just stepped outside for a minute. "I like your place," she said, and she nodded at the original Magritte on the wall. Pepper had rescued it from Tony's collection; puffy white clouds filled a cerulean blue sky, but the houses below were shadowed and lamp-lit, as if at night.

"Thank you," Pepper said politely. She didn't reach for her phone; from what Happy had said, if Natasha wanted to harm her, Pepper didn't stand a chance.

"Has the job gotten any easier?"

Pepper huffed out a half-laugh. She'd spent some time complaining to Natalie about the difficulties of persuading anyone at Stark Industries to accept a newly emancipated slave as their CEO. "Yes and no. I'm working my way through the Board, wooing or weeding out as necessary, but convincing the public is going to take time and a longer track record." She paused, regrouping; she'd always found it dangerously easy to say anything to Natasha. "I don't think you're here to talk about that, though."

"No," Natasha said, "I'm not." She fixed Pepper with an intent, amused gaze. "I'm here to seduce you."

Pepper blinked. "For work or pleasure?"

Natasha simply shrugged. "SHIELD is intrigued by the possibilities of Iron Man, but we're far more interested in a broader relationship with Stark Industries. Coulson will continue to be your official liaison, but I've been instructed to help sweeten the relationship, so to speak."

"... But?" Pepper prompted.

"But I have my own reasons for wanting to initiate this." She paused. "You'll probably regret sleeping with me, and you need to understand that up front. If you choose not to do this, I'll simply report back that you're uninterested in women -- and to be frank, that would be the wisest decision for you. But I'd very much like this, so I thought I'd give you the opportunity to make your own mistakes."

Very carefully, Pepper set her purse down on the table and approached Natasha. "If SHIELD told you to stop seeing me, this would be over in an instant."

Natasha quirked a small smile. "I may be a slave, Ms. Potts, but I have resources. This would be over when you or I decide that it's over."

Pepper knew that trusting her wasn't smart. Most of their interactions had been built on and laced through with lies. For that matter, Natasha herself had warned her that she'd regret it. But God help her, she _wanted_ this, and it had been so long since she'd had the freedom to make her own mistakes. "All right," she said, allowing a thin twist of a smile to escape. "Seduce me."

Natasha stood up from the table, slender and deadly as a stiletto blade. "It'd be my pleasure."

 

...

 

"You think I'm making a mistake, don't you," Pepper said, ten minutes into her first coffee date with Phil since everything got upturned. She'd wanted to be angry at Phil for lying to her about Natasha, but in fairness, he'd always tried to keep his job out of their conversations. After the first awkward moment of hesitance, they'd fallen right back into their comfortable back-and-forth of mutual respect.

Phil's eyebrows twitched upward. "Why would I think that?"

"Because she obviously has ulterior motives. Because the only thing resembling a long-term relationship that I've had since college was with my emotionally stunted former master and current employee. Because I barely have time to sleep, let alone sleep with someone. Because relationships with other people's slaves never end well."

Phil's lip tensed into an almost-wince at her last statement, but he smoothed it over in a flash. "Those are all legitimate concerns, but you seem to be very aware of them." He met her eyes, then stared thoughtfully at the dark brew in his cup. "If you'd asked me this over e-mail, I would have had my doubts. Yes, SHIELD is in favor of your relationship, but I'm of the opinion that maintaining your long-term happiness is in our interests, and I was skeptical about the plan. But you look happy, Pepper, and I don't think it's just freedom. You're glowing."

"Freedom doesn't hurt," Pepper said wryly. She knew Phil couldn't understand how different it felt, even if her day-to-day life wasn't far from what it had been as Tony's slave. Freedom felt like she'd been clicking around on five-inch heels for years, and she could finally slip them off and feel grass under her feet. Every so often, she just wanted to burrow her metaphorical toes into the dirt and wiggle in them in delight, simply because she _could_.

But that wasn't all, and she could admit it in the light of Phil's knowing gaze. "She does make me happy," Pepper agreed at last.

"Then don't let go of it." A faint shadow marred Phil's voice.

Pepper reached across the table and placed her hand on Phil's. "You'll find someone." She tried to sound more optimistic than she felt. Neither of their schedules left much time for meeting new people, after all.

"Finding someone isn't the problem."

Her eyes widened. "God, don't tell me that Natasha --"

"No, not Natasha," Phil said, with a short laugh. "She's lovely, but not exactly my preferred set of attributes."

"Ah. Well, if it's Tony, I can --"

" _No_ ," Phil said. Emphatically. "It's no one you know, and it's irrelevant to this conversation. My point is simply that you've found someone who makes you happy, and I won't tell you not to pursue it."

"All right." Pepper's curiosity was burning, but she recognized a lost cause when she saw one. She squeezed Phil's hand again. "You're a good man, Phil Coulson."

He smiled, small and rueful. "I try."

 

...

 

Pepper had been seeing Natasha on and off for nearly a month, whenever they could find a spare evening, when everything changed again. They were sprawled naked on Pepper's bed, close but not touching, so the sweat of energetic sex could dry from their skin.

Natasha rolled on her side, once their breaths had evened out, and she looked straight at Pepper with eyes that had lost all their post-coital haziness. "I've been authorized to talk with you about the Avengers Initiative."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Omelaas (for cheerleading when I needed it most), Marmolita (for immensely helpful suggestions), Rhod (for thoughtful observations and legal geekery), and Hegemony (for asking really excellent questions).
> 
> Two important announcements are at the end of the next (short) chapter.


	4. (Interlude: A Fairy Tale)

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful little girl, with hair as red as blood and skin as pale as death. She was born a serf of the tsar, and every time that the rifles in the tsar's palace changed hands from one set of men to another, she remained a serf. But one day, a man in bright red gloves arrived at the palace, and he called her into a small room.

The man asked her many questions, and the girl answered all of them rightly, for she was quick of mind. He made her run and jump and lift great big bricks, and the girl completed his exercises with ease, for she was strong and deft of limb. Everything he asked, she demonstrated with delight, and the man in red gloves grew pleased.

At last, he drew a cage from beneath the table and showed the girl two frightened rabbits. One was plump and healthy, with sleek fur and bright eyes; the other looked near to death, with hollow sides and weak movements. "You have done very well today," the man said. "You may have one rabbit for your dinner, and I shall take the other home for myself. Which one would you like?"

The little girl was quick and strong and very hungry, but she was also clever, and she knew that he would not have mentioned eating the remaining rabbit without cause. So she pointed to the sickly rabbit, leaving the fine one for the man in red gloves.

"Then you must kill it, so you may cook it," the man said. He showed the girl how to hold the rabbit's neck and where to twist it. Her hands trembled, but they did not falter, even when it took a few attempts to get the movement right, while the rabbit writhed and kicked against her grasp.

The little girl slept that night with a belly full of rabbit stew, and the rich food gave her strange dreams. She dreamt that the sickly rabbit stood before her, alive once more, and it spoke with the voice of a man. "Alas! You should not have chosen me," the rabbit said.

"Are you angry that I killed you?" the little girl asked.

The rabbit laughed, high and rasping. "I was to die today, no matter your choice. Such is the life of prey. But you had a choice -- the last one you shall have."

"I chose correctly," the girl said, and she frowned in displeasure.

Again the rabbit laughed. "You chose to cast away your choice and your desires, and thus they will be taken from you. You are quick and strong and clever, little girl, but you would have done better to learn the foolish wisdom of bravery."

This time, the girl laughed back at the rabbit's face, and her laughter sounded like the sigh of an old woman. She had been born a serf, and though regimes fell, she remained a serf, and no amount of bravery could have changed that. But that day, she believed that her cleverness had bought her a change, and perhaps a better life. So the girl turned her back on the rabbit, and she slept soundly for the rest of the night.

On the morrow, the man with the red gloves came to take her from the palace. He brought her by train to a secluded place, where he put her in a room filled with girls like her, all huddled like little rabbits in a cage. One by one, the girls disappeared from the room, and the stone walls of their cage were so thick that they could not even hear their sisters' screams.

When the time came for the little girl, she wrestled and bit her captors, but her quick wits were not quick enough, and her strong limbs were not strong enough. So they took her to the man with the bright red gloves. He laughed at her terror, and he lifted her up by her skinny wrists. And in the shadows of that red room, he gobbled her up whole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of announcements.
> 
> First, I'm afraid that this fic is on indefinite hiatus. I've been sitting on this update for a couple of months, and I think that I'm at a place where I want to get it out of my hands, but won't be finishing more chapters in the immediate future. My own personal background and expertise have a lot more to do with slavery in the ancient world, which is detached from our own in many ways, lending a fantasy/what-if aura to the AU. But the fact is that slavery isn't a distant fantasy in American history, and wrestling responsibly with all the baggage it bears requires more knowledge and time and care than I have right now. I'm still happy with many of the issues I wrestled with in these chapters, but I'd rather step away for now until I'm more confident that I'm doing right by the subject.
> 
> Second, and on a happier note, the AO3 Fundraiser Auction is a day away from finishing. You can [bid on me](http://ao3auction.tumblr.com/sinope) to write one (or more) stories of your choice, and I promise that I will be very flexible to get you the story you'd most love to read! Even if you decide not to bid on me, I encourage you to check out the [author list](http://ao3auction.tumblr.com/authorlist), since there are some absolutely incredible authors who're a steal to bid on. Great cause, too.

**Author's Note:**

> _Life is parallel to Hell, but I must maintain._
> 
>  
> 
> So. This is a slave AU.
> 
> The fundamental premise of the universe is that slavery, as practiced in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, continued to be normative in Western civilization up to the present day. As was the case then, slavery is not primarily race-based, although the practice of enslaving people groups meant that slaves are more likely to come from certain ethnicities (e.g. Irish). One can be born into slavery, sell oneself into slavery to pay a debt, or be forcibly enslaved. (Enslaving someone forcibly is on par with killing them: it's generally only legitimate between nations in warfare, but it also happens illegally for profit.) International law upholds slaveowners' rights and supports the retrieval of fugitive slaves. Slaves are not purely chattel; they have inherent rights, and laws do prosecute owners who abuse or kill their slaves. In practice, though, a slave would need overwhelming evidence to prove successfully that abuse had taken place.
> 
> Consent issues and race issues are, as I see it, the two places where slave!AUs have the greatest potential for being problematic. To address the former: I am completely aware of the fact that sexual consent between a slave and his/her owner is compromised if not impossible. I have tried my best to be aware of that fact and make it clear in my depictions. If you feel that I have glossed over the problematic nature of consent in these situations, or if you feel I have warned for them inadequately, I welcome feedback, whether here or by e-mail (sinope at gmail).
> 
> To address the latter: I'm white and from the United States. I'm acutely aware that this makes me a non-ideal person to write about slavery. Please, for the love of God, go read what authors of color have written about the experience and legacy of American slavery; it's not primarily my story to tell. (Specifically, I thoroughly recommend _Truth: Red, White & Black_ for a brilliant and chilling look at the Marvel universe through an African-American lens.) In the fictional world of this AU, the Atlantic slave trade took place on a much smaller scale and was subsumed under the broader practice of slavery. I'm aware (and uncomfortable) that this results in the partial erasure of Black history, and I am very, very eager for suggestions on ways to reduce that. Please comment or e-mail (sinope at gmail) if you have concerns or would like to talk.
> 
> (The title and the quote above are from Nas's ["N.Y. State of Mind."](http://rapgenius.com/Nas-ny-state-of-mind-lyrics#note-3012) If this universe/idea seems familiar, it's because I prompted for it [on the kinkmeme](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/11065.html?thread=24259385), then decided I wanted to give it a shot myself.)


End file.
